ABSTRACT
When David Hume speaks of relations which can be changed without any change in the ideas, he does not mean the private and peculiar ideas of individual persons, the sum total of their beliefs about the object in question. The subject of memory is one on which Hume is notoriously weak; but no worse in that respect than other philosophers of his own and earlier times. Hume then proceeds to enquire how causal relationships are discovered, and answers “from experience”; and how they serve as the basis of factual inferences, and answers that the experience of constant conjunction generates a habit of expectation in the mind. He starts by distinguishing propositions expressing “Relations of Ideas” and propositions expressing “Matters of Fact”. Hume’s contention is that no a priori propositions are synthetic, all a priori propositions are analytic, all synthetic propositions empirical. The distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact is supremely important.
